Since it's been so long, I will be reassessing this series of updates. I won't be cancelling it so much as reminding myself what and why I was doing what I was doing. Will update you all once I work through that.

If anyone has feature requests or something I should really focus on fixing or doing well when I start back up again, please let me know either here, in the Harsh Crits thread, or even the Task List.

Decided to move to a new version of DS. It will be called DS8 (what a surprise!).

Right now I am just scoping things out, but I want the update to be a significant one. I will be doing a very thorough job with planning and designing so DS8 is still a long way off, but I wanted to give you a heads up on some of the big changes I am seriously considering doing.

Dropping Phpbb. I would like to get the entire site under a single framework/cms. With how much of a mess phpbb's code is, the total lack of documentation for the code, and how much time I waste every time I have to deal with it...I just want to start fresh with code that isn't stuck in the stone ages of the internet. It will be risky though.

Moving to a better server. Right now I have shared hosting, which restricts a lot of what I can do. Moving to a new better server will let me do some cool things, like making a real chatroom or allowing you to upload videos directly to DS. Problem is this will cost me more money to the point that the ads probably won't cover hosting costs anymore.

Upgrade everything. This will ultimately mean stripping out things we don't need and improving on existing functionality. I don't think I will be creating any big new features but it's not outside the realm of possibility if you guys beg and plead enough.

DS8 will be designed before I code. In the past, I generally jumped to coding before I fully finished the design and features I wanted to include into the site. This time I won't be writing any code until people are peeing their pants in excitement for DS8.

Thoughts, suggestions, complains? I do intent to start the planning phase for DS8 this weekend, so now is a really good time to tell me what is important to you on the site.

Well, video support directly on DS would be nice.. Personally though I think that is what I lack the most. I mean, imagine video tutorials for DS-members only. We will get more members (especially if we can get some more tutorials up, and I stop procrastinating on my BGE tuts). And not only that, the word will spread more since it will be on DS only, and not on youtube, Vimeo, Dailymotion w/e.

@djm: Definitely. Exclusivity is one of the big reasons I want to expand on what can be directly hosted on DS. It's also a lot more intuitive and less time consuming to just upload to DS than to go through the process of embedding.

@brektzar: I'm not sure yet. I'm trying to keep my options open. My primary goal is to consolidate the whole site into a single framework/cms so that I can cut down on the code I have to write and so that I don't have the disjointed mess I have now.

I'm currently leaning towards using a framework and building on top of that. The problem with a full CMS (like Joomla or Drupal) is that they generally feel to rigid and bloated with things I don't want or need and my experience with existing CMSes haven't been the greatest. I generally prefer to have a little more control.

If I were forced to make a decision right this second, I'd probably pick Vanilla Forums. It's actually a PHP framework (called Garden) that includes a forum addon (called Vanilla) and they have a phpbb importer. However, if I move to a server I have more control over, Phalcon will be high on my list. Codeigniter and Laravel look to be solid options too. There are so many options though...